Decades before Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy, comedian Kenny Bob Davis was essential in creating the genre known as country comedy. Considering his resume, you’d never guess he grew up in Burbank.

Davis began his entertainment career playing guitar on the beaches of Catalina between lifeguarding shifts and in small folk bands along the Southern California coast.

In the mid-1970s, he took The Kenny Davis Road Show to Las Vegas, where he played small rooms and opened for headliners in showrooms all over the strip; he even was voted “Lounge Act of the Year — 1977.”

During one fateful performance, Davis was unaware that Larry Gatlin, of the famed country band the Gatlin Brothers, was in the audience. He invited Davis to open for him on tour, taking his career down a completely new path.

“I was a surfer, I knew nothing about country, but it gave me a whole new direction, and for 15 years I was opening for country acts,” Davis said during a recent phone interview.

Kenny Bob Davis

“Larry (Gatlin) and Willie Nelson even made up the name Kenny Bob Davis. They said, ‘You’ve got to have three names if you’re going to be country.’”

Davis became a fixture on the country music scene, opening for such country greats as Vince Gill, Alabama and Kenny Rogers. His unique blend of comedy and country music made him an easy crossover opening act to a variety of performers from country bands to comedy headliners.

His most memorable professional moment came in 1988, when Davis had the opportunity to open for comedy legend George Burns, something that has continued to inspire him for the past 25 years.

“I did 30 minutes in front of the crowd, and then there was a girl singer who did three songs before George came on,” Davis said.

“During the songs, he brought me into his dressing room because he’d been watching me on the video screen. He said, ‘You’re very, very funny. You must be Jewish.’ I said I wasn’t Jewish, I was Catholic.

“And he said ‘Well, then your milkman was Jewish.’ That was the best job I ever had.”

After years of appearing as the second name on the marquee, Davis’ warm character and charisma made it easy to transition into acting, and he appeared in television shows including “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “ER,” among others.

Regardless of the dozens of acting credits on his resume, Davis is most recognized for the small role of a bar owner in an early ’80s cult favorite.

“Whenever people come to my show, they are excited that I was in ‘Gremlins,’” he said. “At the time when ‘Gremlins’ came out, I was so mad that they cut out 80 percent of what the actors did and put in those gremlins, but Steven Spielberg knew what he was doing, and he made it a classic.”